Friday Feb 21, 2014

I guess the term thought leader means I
share my thoughts with you, but actually I believe we are more successful if
after reading my post you are the one doing the thinking, more of a Thought Provoker than leader.

The social world in which we now all
reside, makes thought more visible and so much easier to share. Communities
share, and all the areas they touch overlap and create the outreach we all feed
from. In this post I want to share a story about one small outreach, the chain
of events behind it, and what that teaches us.

In my bio I am introduced as an Oracle
ACE Director and so I thought I start my story with a little bit more about it,
because these are people you should follow.

For those who are recognised subject
leaders and who are very active advocates, speakers, authors, bloggers there is
the ACE Director designation, which I am very proud to be part of.

This community of ACE Directors has
spawned a few initiatives one of which I am very honoured to have been a
catalyst for, the Applications
UX Advocate program. Here a group of us in the Middleware area have been
working with Oracle Development looking at the User Experience and the
discipline and research invested in by Oracle. We have learned through
workshops and collaborative projects and in turn present in usergroup events to
share back to the wider community. The value to Oracle above us simply being
advocates is the feedback from a wide range of experts about the applications
and approach.

One of my peers here is Sten Vesterli, a quiet Dane who likes in his
spare time to compete in Triathlons, Sten is a thought leader in the
development world and his latest book ADF
Enterprise Application Development - Made
Simple has been
very well received. As part of the UX advocates group when we were looking at
the design patterns used by the Fusion Applications development teams, Sten sked
if these could be shared with the wider development community. Not
long after they were. Sten has recently started a newsletter
series called Technology that Fits
which I recommend to all Oracle AppAdvantage followers. Sign
up now.

Last year Oracle released ADF mobile,
and the adoption is widespread. Mobile has taken over the way we work, in fact
I am typing this on my iPad mini as I fly to a diving holiday in the
Philippines! In business we see mobile or the need for mobile everywhere. If
you are using or thinking of ADF mobile look no further than OTN for the design
patterns created after 1,000s of hours research by the UX team, allowing you to
adopt industry standard, proven designs quickly and make your mobile
applications efficient and easy to adopt.

This is a very practical example of the
benefits of using social in business. Oracle through their flagship OTN
community, initiated the ACE program which reaches out to all users of Oracle
technology and spawned from that was the UX program and then Sten, an
individual component set off the chain of events that led to a valuable
resource being made available free to that community.

Social could be an enabler for your
business, and the Oracle social tools may be your Oracle AppAdvantage entry
point.

Lilley has
18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since
9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Lead and Oracle Alliance Director.
She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at
debrasoraclethoughts.